We have a completely dysfunctional process here, in which it's clear that, thanks to the circumspect way this surveillance was implemented, the NSA has been spying on Americans without any effective form of oversight or control, and that many of the people involved have lied about it, repeatedly, to the very folks supposedly providing that oversight and control.

Remember, one of the big arguments used against Snowden is that he had adequate official channels that he could've used to report years of illegal, unethical activity by one of the nastiest organizations on the planet, rather than going public with classified information. It's pretty obvious that the argument is false. We have, instead, an interlocking chain of incredible ethical failure, from bottom to top, because no one looked too closely at a program that should've been scrutinized at every damned level.

Your government isn't just lying to you - it's lying to itself, too. It believes it has control over its more extreme elements, when it's obvious that those elements ran roughshod over those controls, your rights, and the damned Constitution, and did so because it could. And yet, that same government wants to pin all the blame on the whistleblower.

As the Washington Post points out, this opinion, which details many instances in which the NSA flat out lied to the court, lends some credence to statements made by presiding judge Reggie Walton, who claimed the court. This opinion appears to detail the NSA setting up its own complicit court system, intentionally misleading it in order to continue its surveillance programs unabated.

I like the way this works. If I go to the building code guy and tell him I'm building a shed, then I build a house, that's cool, right?

Let us not forget that, for all this money they spend so lavishly, (and appears to be exempt from sequestration,) they were unable to catch two terrorists from a country that exports war and mayhem, and instead had to impose martial law on Boston to make up for their looking in the wrong direction.

Or maybe they're really just concentrating on what they estimate is the biggest threat to THEM.

Headso:The people apologizing for the NSA have been slowly disappearing from these threads as more and more comes out about the extent of their lying.

The best part is apparently the NSA doesn't know all the files Snowden has, so they say something one day and the next day the Guardian and the Post release "uh no that's a lie" documents proving it false.

WTF Indeed:Obviously this public display of bureaucratic regulatory differences only further proves that America is a totalitarian state built on a mountain of lies and secretsfunctioning, albeit imperfect Democracy where governmental excesses are eventually reigned in.

BullBearMS:A federal judge sharply rebuked the National Security Agency in 2011 for repeatedly misleading the court that oversees its surveillance on domestic soil, including a program that is collecting tens of thousands of domestic e-mails and other Internet communications of Americans each year, according to a secret ruling made public on Wednesday.

Yeah, only he didn't. A "sharp rebuke" would have entailed making it clear that further incidents would have resulted in senior NSA officials going to jail. Instead, he issued a "next time I'll write a strongly worded letter" rebuke, which is not the same thing at all.

HAMMERTOE:China White Tea: There are enough mewling quims who are terrified, first and foremost, of terrorists, that there will never be a sizable majority of people who want to see someone held accountable for this shiat.

As more and more people are finding out, we are all "terrorists" in their eyes. Suddenly, the mewling stops and gets replaced with, "Me?!? You're assuming I'm a terrorist?!? For all the money you waste, do you people even have a farking clue?"

My observations so far - admittedly, casual observations - have been that the people who love the state and think it can do no wrong tend to double down with each new revelation. Switching positions means that not only do they have to admit that they were wrong about something (perish the thought), but that their beloved America isn't the great bastion of freedom and justice that they incessantly brag about at every last opportunity. Who wants to deal with all of that when you can just grab your tiny American flag and patriotically declare, "NEVER AGAIN!"

China White Tea:There are enough mewling quims who are terrified, first and foremost, of terrorists, that there will never be a sizable majority of people who want to see someone held accountable for this shiat.

As more and more people are finding out, we are all "terrorists" in their eyes. Suddenly, the mewling stops and gets replaced with, "Me?!? You're assuming I'm a terrorist?!? For all the money you waste, do you people even have a farking clue?"

LedZeppelinRule:You missed the fact that FISA was pretending to be upset that the NSA repeatedly was searching metadata using queries outside the scope of their authorization. And that's just what FISA was hoping the people hadn't found out about.

Really, they're just a rubber-stamp organization to lend the NSA the appearance of credibility. Since when have the Supremes seriously curtailed the power of runaway government?

We have a completely dysfunctional process here, in which it's clear that, thanks to the circumspect way this surveillance was implemented, the NSA has been spying on Americans without any effective form of oversight or control, and that many of the people involved have lied about it, repeatedly, to the very folks supposedly providing that oversight and control.

Remember, one of the big arguments used against Snowden is that he had adequate official channels that he could've used to report years of illegal, unethical activity by one of the nastiest organizations on the planet, rather than going public with classified information. It's pretty obvious that the argument is false. We have, instead, an interlocking chain of incredible ethical failure, from bottom to top, because no one looked too closely at a program that should've been scrutinized at every damned level.

Your government isn't just lying to you - it's lying to itself, too. It believes it has control over its more extreme elements, when it's obvious that those elements ran roughshod over those controls, your rights, and the damned Constitution, and did so because it could. And yet, that same government wants to pin all the blame on the whistleblower.

After last week's revelations extensive National Security Agency surveillance of phone and internet communications, President Barack Obama made it a point to assure Americans that, not to worry, there is plenty of oversight of his administration's snooping programs. "We've got congressional oversight and judicial oversight," he said Friday, referring in part to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which was created in 1979 to oversee Department of Justice requests for surveillance warrants against foreign agents suspected of espionage or terrorism in the United States. But the FISC has declined just 11 of the more than 33,900 surveillance requests made by the government in 33 years, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. That's a rate of .03 percent, which raises questions about just how much judicial oversight is actually being provided.

It will ultimately fall on the NSA for overstepping it's authority. Congress, the courts, the Obama administration will all say that Clapper bamboozled them. More transparency and oversight will be put into place.

Which was the whole point all along. The NSA cheats, and it needs a tighter leash.

bdub77:LOL. The FISA court. You mean the rubber stamp brigade? Even if the NSA wasn't lying to them, the FISA court hardly had any kind of oversight role. Nor does anyone have oversight over the FISA court.

The Stasis were never this good.

Things you got wrong:

1)The FISA court is upset that they aren't reporting all violations, even accidental, to them2) The FISA court is overseen by the SCOTUS